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Continental Philosophy | Philosophy | Philosophy of Science

Abstract

Truth-invariance relative to synchronous communities of knowers in all countries of the world seems to be one of the striking facts about science that distinguishes it from common sense or even from philosophy. Science is international, cosmopolitan and has, it is claimed, but one language. So pervasive is this belief about the one language of science that it might seem to be almost part of what we mean by the scientific enterprise, and it was indeed a part of the classical philosophy of Newton, Descartes and Kant which supported the scientific enterprise in the first three hundred years of its existence. We raise the question then: is the truth-invariance of science relative to contemporary living communities of knowers, merely a synthetic empirical claim, or do we in fact, for whatever reason, dignify with the name of science only those claims which are truth-invariant in this way?